Comparative user testing to the rescue: you ask the participants to evaluate your website as well as the websites of your top 2 competitors. To avoid biased feedback, try not to disclose which company you are with, and mix up the order in which you show the websites to the participants. Not to overwhelm the participants, limit the number of websites to 3 per person.
But consider this: only a lead who is in the early stages of researching a product or solution (aka not ready to convert) uses such general keywords in their search engine research, simply because they aren’t yet educated enough about what they’re looking for. Similar to a negative keyword strategy, bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) keywords can help you reach avoid the wrong leads. These keywords are ones that are more pricing and service-oriented, which will bring in consumers who have a higher potential of converting as a result of your PPC ads.

Geo-targeting (sometimes spelled geotargeting or geo targeting) involves detecting a user’s location, and serving them communications based on that location. Those communications might be ads or other content, like an email or geo-targeted push notification. Geo-targeted communications are delivered most commonly through text or push, and might also come when you open a certain app or social media site. The benefit of geo-targeting services are simple: enhanced personalization.

More specifically, who gets to appear on the page and where is based on an advertiser’s Ad Rank, a metric calculated by multiplying two key factors – CPC Bid (the highest amount an advertiser is willing to spend) and Quality Score (a value that takes into account your click-through rate, relevance, and landing page quality, among other factors). In turn, your Quality Score affects your actual cost per click, or CPC.

In the Google Sheets Template, I've provided you with the data points that we'll be collecting, the tools you'll need to do so, and then bucketed the metrics based on similar themes. The data we're trying to collect relates to SEO metrics like domain authority, how much traffic the competition is getting, which keywords are driving that traffic, and the depth of competitors’ backlink profiles. I have built in a few heatmaps for key metrics to help you visualize who's the strongest at a glance.

This is a great list! I especially appreciate the sample set of pages you recommended - oftentimes we ask clients we're onboarding who they consider to be their competitors, but once we start digging into their sites we see they're not necessarily "search" competitors or the sites just aren't that similar to be regarded as such in the search engine's eyes. At least these pages can help weed out any sites that just aren't built out to be similar to a client or are way ahead, so you can get an accurate comparison!
Google is constantly refining and adding new tools to AdWords, so remaining active with your PPC strategies is critical if you want to beat out your competition. There’s never a set-it-and-forget-it approach that you can take–as much as one might wish–so it’s important that you test, analyze, re-test, and repeat to find out what is working for you and what is not. Also, keep in mind that while some strategies might work wonders for a particular business or industry, they may not be as effective with yours. Experiment with different approaches, but don’t be too quick to abandon ones that don’t show immediate results. Some investments require time to show their return.

You will likely run into some difficulties along the way, and you may need to develop a hybrid strategy to achieve your goals. For example, I have often broken out campaigns between profitability focused keywords and brand focused keywords in order to satisfy clients. This is especially useful when someone demands visibility for certain keywords but does not give enough budget to achieve that visibility. The same goes for balancing visibility and profit.

Ego and assumptions led me to choose the wrong keywords for my own site. How did I spend three years optimizing my site and building links to finally crack the top three for six critical keywords, only to find out that I wasted all that time? However, in spite of targeting the wrong words, Seer grew the business. In this presentation, Will shows you the mistakes made and share with you the approaches that can help you build content that gets you thanked.

This chapter will discuss how to best structure your campaign within Google AdWords. These basic building blocks are campaigns and ad groups contained within those campaigns. How you structure this will depend upon your business and marketing and the main takeaway here is that there is no single way to structure a campaign. Just be mindful of what matters when it comes to advertising and measuring the results of your campaign.

Overall score: Finally, you simply add up the scores and divide by the number of columns you have. This will give you an overall score. Then you can sort your keyword list by overall score and voilà, your keywords that are likely to perform the best for you bubble up to the top. You can weight each column if you like based on which factors are most important to you.

Another thing to keep in mind is your landing page’s loading speed. Can you remember the last time you waited for a page to load? Probably not. Chances are you exited the page and moved on to something else. That’s the last thing you want when there’s a customer willing to spend money. Speak to your website manager to ensure your landing pages load quickly.
Geographically targeted ads can increase returns significantly over "blind advertising." On the Internet, clickthrough rates are improved compared with advertisements not targeted by location. The results in a given situation depend on the geographical distribution of potential customers, a variable that requires intensive research to accurately determine.
The unique advantage of PPC marketing is that Google (and other ad networks) don’t just reward the highest bidders for that ad space, they reward the highest-quality ads (meaning the ads that are most popular with users). Essentially, Google rewards good performance. The better your ads, the greater your click-through rates and the lower your costs.
Online pay-per-click (PPC) advertising allows almost anyone to create ads. Each time your ad pops up online and someone clicks on it, you pay a small fee. PPC advertising appears in search engines like Google or Bing and on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. The point of PPC is to get fresh visitors to discover your business online.

- Hi, I'm Matt Bailey. Welcome to keyword strategy in depth. Keyword research is the fundamental building block, for all of your on-line marketing efforts. It goes beyond optimizing your website, to enabling a better connection when marketing to your audience, as you are using their language. We'll begin by finding sources for keywords, seeing how search engines deliver different results based on the types of keywords, and building your keyword lists. Next, I'll demonstrate how to effectively sift through the keyword data, in ways that maximize your ability to understand the searcher, and derive their intent. We'll see how to implement your keywords throughout the content of your website. Then, I'll demonstrate how to setup an initial Google AdWords campaign, utilizing your keywords, and avoiding the top five mistakes that companies make in AdWords. I've been marketing online for nearly 20 years, and I love to teach people how to be successful in their own businesses with the tools…

The strategic rationale of competitor profiling is simple. Superior knowledge of rivals offers a legitimate source of competitive advantage[7]. The raw material of competitive advantage consists of offering superior customer value in the firm’s chosen market. The definitive characteristic of customer value is the adjective, superior. Customer value is defined relative to rival offerings making competitor knowledge an intrinsic component of corporate strategy. Profiling facilitates this strategic objective in three important ways.[8] First, profiling can reveal strategic weaknesses in rivals that the firm may exploit. Second, the proactive stance of competitor profiling will allow the firm to anticipate the strategic response of their rivals to the firm’s planned strategies, the strategies of other competing firms, and changes in the environment. Third, this proactive knowledge will give the firms strategic agility. Offensive strategy can be implemented more quickly in order to exploit opportunities and capitalize on strengths. Similarly, defensive strategy can be employed more deftly in order to counter the threat of rival firms from exploiting the firm’s own weaknesses.[5]

From my experience, you don’t need complex algorithms to save money with paid search. You don’t need a crazy PPC management tool to trim down costs for campaigns. You need only employ one of 3 core paid search strategies in order to succeed in your PPC campaigns: 1) Maximize your budget, 2) Improve Branding by showing up in a top position and 3) Maximize your profit potential.
Michiel wrote about Homepage SEO, telling people not to try and rank their homepage for a specific keyword. In the comments there were clearly some misconceptions about how branding relates to your keyword strategy. We’ve been writing a lot about keyword research lately but we’ve not talked about keyword strategy much, so this post elaborates on what these are and how they connect to each other.
Of course, many small businesses don’t have the time or expertise to run tests on the successes and failures of their PPC campaigns. This is why simplified tools that use complex machine learning to do the testing for you are so helpful to manage PPC for small businesses. If you’re a small business owner and want to take it on yourself though, follow the winning strategies above to get started on the right track!

A competitor's capabilities can be analyzed according to its strengths and weaknesses in various functional areas, as is done in a SWOT analysis. The competitor's strengths define its capabilities. The analysis can be taken further to evaluate the competitor's ability to increase its capabilities in certain areas. A financial analysis can be performed to reveal its sustainable growth rate.

For branding campaigns, your budget is often not an issue. You may have a fixed budget or your budget may be seemingly limitless. It doesn’t matter, because with this strategy the focus is on position; and in most cases only position #1 will do. This is often the easiest strategy to execute for paid search, but it’s also inefficient. The reality is that bidding into the top position in search results is often a waste of money. Google has gone on the record as saying that conversion rates don’t vary much by position, so in many cases all that the first position buys you in paid search is brand awareness (and vanity).

Once you've done your research, you want to make sure you're incorporating it into your content marketing strategy every step of the way. One of the best ways to keep yourself and your team on track is to use a tool that's already integrated with your marketing automation platform. This will give everyone visibility into what keywords your team is using, how they're using them and how your content is performing.

Test putting the location in the ad copy. If you’re a local business, there’s a chance that people want to find you locally. Who cares about a tire repair shop in Massachusetts if you’re in Denver? Because of this, putting the location in your ad copy can give you an edge. If necessary, run multiple campaigns with each specifying the individual location.<
Geo-targeting is virtually a necessity for businesses advertising online, since they cannot assume – as one can with traditional media, like newspapers or radio – where their audience is located. Luckily, this powerful tool is not hard to implement. For example, a small outfit like a pizza parlor with a finite delivery range can purchase online ads that only appear in the browsers of people with an IP address within the neighborhood. Geo-targeting also increases the opportunities for A/B testing. For example, a Japanese-speaking immigration lawyer in the U.S. may choose to run two separately geo-targeted campaigns: one locally for people looking to bring family over or maintain status in the country, and another one in Japan targeting people looking to emigrate.
The gap between your goal and your recent performance should guide how you choose from the menu of strategy options. If you have aggressive growth targets and are consistently meeting or exceeding your ROAS threshold, then you should primarily focus on growth initiatives, and sprinkle in a few efficiency optimizations to ensure that you’re not wasting spend. If you are not achieving your ROAS goal, you’ll want to focus primarily on efficiency optimizations. If you fall somewhere in the middle of these two scenarios, you should select an even mix of growth and efficiency efforts.
With the constant stream of new betas, introduction of format changes (hello Expanded Text Ads!) and a multitude of new targeting methods such as tablet bid modifiers and demographic bidding for search, paid search marketing continues to become more and more complex. Gone are the days when running ad copy tests, adding negative keywords, performing bid adjustments, and launching more targeted ad groups was sufficient to drive account growth. Today’s paid search advertiser must choose from hundreds of available account optimization strategies.
The effectiveness of geo-targeting is only going to further improve as mobile use grows and location data becomes more accurate and available. The Local Search Association (LSA) just released data that found that, for the first time, mobile devices surpassed PC use in search for local businesses and services. As I reported last month, the majority of searches (52%) for local information on mobile devices occur either in the car or away from home or work.
- Hi, I'm Matt Bailey. Welcome to keyword strategy in depth. Keyword research is the fundamental building block, for all of your on-line marketing efforts. It goes beyond optimizing your website, to enabling a better connection when marketing to your audience, as you are using their language. We'll begin by finding sources for keywords, seeing how search engines deliver different results based on the types of keywords, and building your keyword lists. Next, I'll demonstrate how to effectively sift through the keyword data, in ways that maximize your ability to understand the searcher, and derive their intent. We'll see how to implement your keywords throughout the content of your website. Then, I'll demonstrate how to setup an initial Google AdWords campaign, utilizing your keywords, and avoiding the top five mistakes that companies make in AdWords. I've been marketing online for nearly 20 years, and I love to teach people how to be successful in their own businesses with the tools…

For this reason, some companies have taken a more direct measurement approach ‎to IP geolocation vs. trying to infer it through ping triangulation. It’s far more ‎straightforward, but requires a lot more manual effort. Basically, these companies ‎send cars out to drive up and down every street in the country and log WiFi IP ‎addresses as well as their physical location to populate the same table that more ‎traditional geolocation companies build through technical means. Google and ‎Skyhook both use this approach.

For example, if a user from a high income neighborhood visits a car dealer’s site or clicks on a paid search display ad, that consumer may be directed to a landing page displaying a luxury vehicle, while consumers located in a lower income area may be targeted with a deal on an economy vehicle. The higher income consumers may be more interested in deals such as cash off or lower interest rates whereas those in lower income brackets may be more receptive to lower monthly payments.
If your competitors are using a social network that you may not be on, it's worth learning more about how that platform may be able to help your business, too. To determine if a new social media platform is worth your time, check your competitor's engagement rates on those sites. First, visit the following sites to see if your competition has an account on these platforms:
The use of semantic search has completely changed the way we perform modern search queries today. A decade ago, people stuck with what was short and simple. If they wanted to find the best pizza places in New York City, they would type in “Pizza New York.” However, with Google’s Hummingbird update and the algorithmic improvements to semantic searches, people now are more inclined to type in “Where is the best pizza place in New York City.”
Website. What’s the first thing visitors see in your competitor’s website? Is there much text on the website, and if there is, what does it emphasize about your competitor’s business? Do they have customer reviews and testimonials? Make note of the design as well. Is their website static and minimalist, or does it have animation and other interactive features? Apart from judging the copy, design, and features of the site itself, does the site rank well for relevant search terms that you think your potential customers could use? If you’re selling handmade leather wallets, try doing a Google search for “handmade leather tool wallets” and see if any of your competitors are in the first few pages.
Using negative keywords in PPC campaigns is an often overlooked but highly effective strategy. These are keywords that you add to your campaign that you don’t want to target. Adding negative keywords will let Google know that it should not show your campaigns in searches that include these words. This is a crucial step in order to make sure that you don’t waste money by displaying your ad for irrelevant searches.
A company rarely competes against just one competitor. In fact, in many cases, the biggest competition in the SaaS and tech industries is coming from indirect competitors. These competitors hold a commanding position in their core market, allowing them to expand into different industries and verticals. Who would have thought that Uber and Google would become die-hard competitors in the autonomous car market? As I wrote previously in my analysis of sales enablement and acceleration industry, it is almost impossible to distinguish direct and indirect competitors. In many SaaS verticals everyone competes with everyone.
That would work but I would prefer to keep the data consistent and use Majestic or Ahrefs instead in that case. The template formulas can be adjusted to work with either tool. Sometimes, I will combine the data from all 3 tools to increase the amount of backlinks in the analysis but that takes a little bit more work and formatting to get it to work properly.